The ghouls

by Haining, Peter, comp

"Where did you see this fly, Henri, and . . . how did you recognize it?"

  "This morning on your desk, Uncle Francois. Its head is white instead of black, and it has a funny sort of leg."

  Feeling more and more like Commissaire Charas, but trying to look unconcerned, I went on:

  "And when did you see this fly for the first time?"

  "The day that Papa went away. I had caught it, but Maman made me let it go. And then after, she wanted me to find it again. She'd changed her mind," and shrugging his shoulders just as my brother used to, he added, "you know how women are."

  "I think that fly must have died long ago, and you must mistaken, Henri," I said, getting up and walking to the door.

  But as soon as I was out of the dining room, I ran up the stairs to my study. There was no fly anywhere to be seen.

  I was bothered, far more than I cared to even think about. Henri had just proved that Charas was really closer to a clue than it had seemed when he told me about his thoughts concerning Helene's pastime.

  For the first time I wondered if Charas did not really know much more than he let on. For the first time also, I wondered about HeUene. Was she really insane? A strange, horrid feeling was growing on me, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt that, somehow, Charas was right: Helene was getting away with it!

  What could possibly have been the reason for such a monstrous crime? What had led up to it? Just what had happened?

  I thought of all the hundreds of questions that Charas had put to Helene, sometimes gently like a nurse trying to soothe, sometimes stern and cold, sometimes barking them furiously. Helene had answered very few, always in a calm quiet voice and never seeming to pay any

  attention to the way in which the question had been put. Though dazed, she had seemed perfectly sane then.

  Refined, well-bred and well-read, Charas was more than just an intelligent police official. He was a keen psychologist and had an amazing way of smelling out a fib or an erroneous statement even before it was uttered. I knew that he had accepted as true the few answers she had given him. But then there had been all those questions which she had never answered: the most direct and important ones. From the very beginning, Helene had adopted a very simple system. "I cannot answer that question," she would say in her low, quiet voice. And that was that! The repetition of the same question never seemed to annoy her. In all the hours of questioning that she underwent, Helene did not once point out to the commissaire that he had already asked her this or that. She would simply say, "I cannot answer that question," as though it was the very first time that that particular question had been asked and the very first time she had made that answer.

  This cliche had become the formidable barrier beyond which Commissaire Charas could not even get a glimpse, an idea of what Helene might be thinking. She had very willingly answered all questions about her life with my brother—which seemed a happy and uneventful one-up to the time of his end. About his death, however, all that she would say was that she had killed him with the steam hammer, but she refused to say why, what had led up to the drama and how she got my brother to put his head under it. She never actually refused outright; she would just go blank and, with no apparent emotion, would switch over to, "I cannot answer that question/'

  Helene, as I have said, had shown the commissaire that she knew how to set and operate the steam hammer.

  Charas could only find one single fact which did not coincide with Helene's declarations, the fact that the hammer had been used twice. Charas was no longer willing to attribute this to insanity. That evident flaw in Helene's stonewall defence seemed a crack which the commissaire might possibly enlarge. But my sister-in-law finally cemented it by acknowledging:

  "All right, I lied to you. I did use the hammer twice. But do not ask me why, because I cannot tell you."

  "Is that your only . . . misstatement, Madame Delambre?" the commissaire had asked, trying to follow up what looked at last like an advantage.

  "It is . . . and you know it, Monsieur le Commissaire."

  And, annoyed, Charas had seen that Helene could read him like an open book.

  I had thought of calling on the commissaire, but the knowledge that he would inevitably start questioning Henri made me hesitate. Another reason also made me hesitate, a vague sort of fear that he would look for and find the fly Henri had talked of. And that annoyed me a good deal because I could find no satisfactory explanation for that particular fear.

  Andre* was definitely not the absent-minded sort of professor who walks about in pouring rain with a rolled umbrella under his arm. He was human, had a keen sense of humour, loved children and animals and could not bear to see anyone suffer. I had often seen him drop his work to watch a parade of the local fire brigade, or see the Tour de France cyclists go by, or even follow a circus parade all around the village. He liked games of logic and precision, such as billiards and tennis, bridge and chess.

  How was it then possible to explain his death? What could have made him put his head under that hammer? It could hardly have been the result of some stupid bet or a test of his courage. He hated betting and had no patience with those who indulged in it. Whenever he heard a bet proposed, he would invariably remind all present that, after all, a bet was but a contract between a fool and a swindler, even if it turned out to be a toss-up as to which was which.

  It seemed there were only two possible explanations for Andre's death. Either he had gone mad, or else he had a reason for letting his wife kill him in such a strange and terrible way. And just what could have been his wife's role in all this? They surely could not have been both insane?

  Having finally decided not to tell Charas about my nephew's innocent revelations, I thought I myself would try to question Helene.

  She seemed to have been expecting my visit for she came into the parlour almost as soon as I had made myself known to the matron and been allowed inside.

  "I wanted to show you my garden," explained Helene as I looked at the coat slung over her shoulders.

  As one of the "reasonable" inmates, she was allowed to go into the garden during certain hours of the day. She had asked for and obtained the right to a little patch of ground where she could grow flowers, and I had sent her seeds and some rosebushes out of my garden.

  She took me straight to a rustic wooden bench which had been

  made in the men's workshop and only just set up under a tree close to her litde patch of ground.

  Searching for the right way to broach the subject of Andre's death, I sat for a while tracing vague designs on the ground with the end of my umbrella.

  "Francois, I want to ask you something," said Helene after a while.

  "Anything I can do for you, Helene?"

  "No, just something I want to know. Do flies live very long?"

  Staring at her, I was about to say that her boy had asked the very same question a few hours earlier when I suddenly realized that here was the opening I had been searching for and perhaps even the possibility of striking a great blow, a blow perhaps powerful enough to shatter her stonewall defence, be it sane or insane.

  Watching her carefully, I replied:

  "I don't really know, Helene; but the fly you were looking for was in my study this morning."

  No doubt about it, I had struck a shattering blow. She swung her head round with such force that I heard the bones crack in her neck. She opened her mouth, but said not a word; only her eyes seemed to be screaming with fear.

  Yes, it was evident that I had crashed through something, but what? Undoubtedly, the commissaire would have known what to do with such an advantage; I did not. All I knew was that he would never have given her time to think, to recuperate, but all I could do, and even that was a strain, was to maintain my best poker face, hoping against hope that Helene's defences would go on crumbling.

  She must have gone quite a while without breathing, because she suddenly gasped and put both her hands over her still open mouth.

  "Francois. . . . Did you k
ill it?" she whispered, her eyes no longer fixed, but searching every inch of my face.

  "No."

  "You have it then . . . You have it on you! Give it to me!" she almost shouted, touching me with both her hands, and I knew that had she felt strong enough, she would have tried to search me.

  "No, Helene, I haven't got it."

  "But you know now . . . You have guessed, haven't you?"

  "No, Helene. I only know one thing, and that is that you are not insane. But I mean to know all, Helene and somehow I am going to find out. You can choose: either you tell me everything and I'll see what is to be done, or . . ."

  "Or what? Say it!"

  "I was going to say it, Helene ... or I assure you that your friend the commissaire will have that fly first thing tomorrow morning."

  She remained quite still, looking down at the palms of her hands on her lap and although it was getting chilly, her forehead and hands were moist.

  Without even brushing aside a wisp of long brown hair blown across her mouth by the breeze, she murmured:

  "If I tell you . . . will you promise to destroy that fly before doing anything else?"

  "No, Helene. I can make no such promise before knowing."

  "But Francois, you must understand. I promised Andre that fly would be destroyed. That promise must be kept and I can say nothing until it is."

  I could sense the deadlock ahead. I was not yet losing ground, but I was losing the initiative. I tried a shot in the dark:

  "Helene, of course you understand that as soon as the police examine that fly, they will know that you are not insane, and then . . ."

  "Francois, no! For Henri's sake! Don't you see? I was expecting that fly; I was hoping it would find me here but it couldn't know what had become of me. What else could it do but go to others it loves, to Henri, to you . . . you who might know and understand what was to be done!"

  Was she really mad, or was she simulating again? But mad or not, she was cornered. Wondering how to follow up and how to land the knockout blow without running the risk of seeing her slip away out of reach, I said very quietly:

  "Tell me all, Helene. I can then protect your boy."

  "Protect my boy from what? Don't you understand that if I am here, it is merely so that Henri won't be the son of a woman who was guillotined for having murdered his father? Don't you understand that I would by far prefer the guillotine to the living death of this lunatic asylum?"

  "I understand, Helene, and I'll do my best for the boy whether you tell me or not. If you refuse to tell me, I'll still do the best I can to protect Henri, but you must understand that the game will be out of my hands, because Commissaire Charas will have the fly."

  "But why must you know?" said, rather than asked, my sister-in-law, struggling to control her temper.

  "Because I must and will know how and why my brother died, Helene."

  "All right. Take me back to the . . . house. I'll give you what your commissaire would call my confession'."

  "Do you mean to say that you have written it!"

  "Yes. It was not really meant for you, but more likely for your friend, the commissaire. I had foreseen that, sooner or later, he would get too close to the truth."

  "You then have no objection to his reading it?"

  "You will act as you think fit, Francois. Wait for me a minute."

  Leaving me at the door of the parlour, Helene ran upstairs to her room. In less than a minute she was back with a large brown envelope.

  "Listen, Francois; you are not nearly as bright as was your poor brother, but you are not unintelligent. All I ask is that you read this alone. After that, you may do as you wish."

  "That I promise you, Helene," I said taking the precious envelope. "I'll read it tonight and although tomorrow is not a visiting day, 111 come down to see you."

  "Just as you like," said my sister-in-law without even saying goodbye as she went back upstairs.

  It was only on reaching home, as I walked from the garage to the house, that I read the inscription on the envelope:

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

  (Probably Commissaire Charas)

  Having told the servants that I would have only a light supper to be served immediately in my study and that I was not to be disturbed after, I ran upstairs, threw Helene's envelope on my desk and made another careful search of the room before closing the shutters and drawing the curtains. All I could find was a long-since-dead mosquito stuck to the wall near the ceiling.

  Having motioned to the servant to put her tray down on a table by the fireplace, I poured myself a glass of wine and locked the door behind her. I then disconnected the telephone—I always did this now at night—and turned out all the lights but the lamp on my desk.

  Slitting open Helene's fat envelope, I extracted a thick wad of closely written pages. I read the following lines neatly centred in the middle of the top page:

  This is not a confession because, although I killed my husband, 1 am not a murderess. 1 simply and very faithfully carried out his last

  wish by crushing his head and right arm under the steam hammer at his brother's factory.

  Without even touching the glass of wine by my elbow, I turned the page and started reading.

  For very nearly a year before his death (the manuscript began), my husband had told me of some of his experiments. He knew full well that his colleagues of the Air Ministry would have forbidden some of them as too dangerous, but he was keen on obtaining positive results before reporting his discovery.

  Whereas only sound and pictures had been, so far, transmitted through space by radio and television, Andre claimed to have discovered a way of transmitting matter. Matter, any solid object, placed in his "transmitter" was instantly disintegrated and reintegrated in a special receiving set.

  Andre considered his discovery as perhaps the most important since that of the wheel sawn off the end of a tree trunk. He reckoned that the transmission of matter by instantaneous "disintegration-reintegra-tion" would completely change life as we had known it so far. It would mean the end of all means of transport, not only of goods including food, but also of human beings. Andre, the practical scientist who never allowed theories or daydreams to get the better of him, already foresaw the time when there would no longer be any aeroplanes, ships, trains or cars and, therefore, no longer any roads or railway lines, ports, airports or stations. All that would be replaced by matter-transmitting and receiving stations throughout the world. Travellers and goods would be placed in special cabins and, at a given signal, would simply disappear and reappear almost immediately at the chosen receiving station.

  Andre's receiving set was only a few feet away from his transmitter, in an adjoining room of his laboratory, and he at first ran into all sorts of snags. His first successful experiment was carried out with an ashtray taken from his desk, a souvenir we had brought back from a trip to London.

  That was the first time he told me about his experiments and I had no idea of what he was talking about the day he came dashing into the house and threw the ashtray in my lap.

  "Helene, look! For a fraction of a second, a bare ten-millionth of

  a second, that ashtray has been completely disintegrated. For one little moment it no longer existed! Gone! Nothing left, absolutely nothing! Only atoms travelling through space at the speed of light! And the moment after, the atoms were once more gathered together in the shape of an ashtray!"

  "Andre please . . . please! What on earth are you raving about?"

  He started sketching all over a letter I had been writing. He laughed at my wry face, swept all my letters off the table and said:

  "You don't understand? Right? Let's start all over again. Helene, do you remember I once read you an article about the mysterious flying stones that seem to come from nowhere in particular, and which are said occasionally to fall in certain houses in India? They come flying in as though thrown from outside, in spite of closed doors and windows."

  "Yes, I remember. I also remember
that Professor Augier, your friend of the College de France, who had come down for a few days, remarked that if there was no trickery about it, the only possible explanation was that the stones had been disintegrated after having been thrown from outside, come through the walls, and then been reintegrated before hitting the floor or the opposite walls."

  "That's right. And I added that there was, of course, one other possibility, namely the momentary and partial disintegration of the walls as the stone or stones came through."

  "Yes, Andre. I remember all that, and I suppose you also remember that I failed to understand, and that you got quite annoyed. Well, I still do not understand why and how, even disintegrated, stones should be able to come through a wall or a closed door."

  "But it is possible, Helene, because the atoms that make up matter are not close together like the bricks of a wall. They are separated by relative immensities of space."

  "Do you mean to say that you have disintegrated that ashtray, and then put it together again after pushing it through something?"

  "Precisely, Helene. I projected it through the wall that separates my transmitter from my receiving set."

  "And would it be foolish to ask how humanity is to benefit from ashtrays that can go through walls?"

  Andre seemed quite offended, but he soon saw that I was only teasing and again waxing enthusiastic, he told me of some of the possibilities of his discovery.

  "Isn't it wonderful, Helene?" he finally gasped, out of breath.

  "Yes, Andre. But I hope you won't ever transmit me; I'd be too much afraid of coming out at the other end like your ashtray."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Do you remember what was written under that ashtray?"

  "Yes, of course: made in japan. That was the great joke of our typically British souvenir."

  "The words are still there Andre; but. . . look!"

  He took the ashtray out of my hands, frowned, and walked over to the window. Then he went quite pale, and I knew that he had seen what had proved to me that he had indeed carried out a strange experiment.